Australian enterprise pioneers NetApp's new range

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 10 November 2010 12:46

Business IT - Networking

One of storage specialist NetApp's large Australian clients was among the first in the world to trial the company's new cloud ready product range - as it couldn't wait for today's official roll out, which has seen 60 per cent of the company's product suite refreshed. While NetApp hasn't named the client which started using the product several weeks ago, its flagship sites in Australia include Telstra, most of the big banks and Suncorp.

Internationally 'we have a few select customers on early adopters,' said John Martin, NetApp's principal technologist.

If large clients are already demanding early access to the product, it's a fair bet that NetApp's on the right track with the refresh. Mr Martin said that the overhaul was 'about delivering functionality for today but with the shared infrastructure benefits for tomorrow.'

It's marketing speak for 'cloud ready'.

NetApp is one of a series of companies participating in the Intel Cloud Builders programme intended to make clouds easier to build, deploy and share, and it seems likely that there will be standards emerge from that which influence product development. According to Mr Martin however the suite of products announced today will remain viable regardless of the outcome of the Cloud Builder's alliance as they are software controlled.

According to Mr Martin storage is increasingly exercising the minds of enterprise IT managers who he claimed are now spending more on storage than they are on processors or software. Certainly the amount of data being accessed is soaring.

Chip giant Intel this week claimed that there would be 175 exabytes of data 'crossing the internet in 2010' much of which is destined for cloud computing applications. By 2015 that was predicted to rise to more than a zettabyte of data.